“Hello, Thea,” he said, modulating his tones. “Is your daddy in?”
“Nope.”
“Can I speak to your mommy, please?”
“Hokay.” A muffled Mommmeee!
Then: “Hello…?”
“Marge, it’s Werner. Is Harry there?”
“No,” she replied. “He’s at the office.” From the false, deliberately cheerful tone of her voice, Blake instantly gleaned two things: she was worried about her husband, and she had no idea what was going on. “He said he left some papers there.”
“Aha,” Werner said, nodding to himself. Batting one for two, so far. “Did he say when he’d be back?”
“No, he didn’t,” she offered. “But he left right after we got back from church, so I’d imagine he’s still there, if you want to try him.”
Her voice trilled and cracked on the word try: desperate pleasantry in overdrive, frightening to behold. “I see,” he replied, leaning back in his chair and drawing the last word out. “Hmmm…”
“Werner?”
“Yes?”
“I…” She paused, as he knew she would. This was taking a lot out of her, piping up like this. Meddling in her husband’s affairs. He could picture her easily in his mind: standing in her kitchen with her centurion helmet of dense-sprayed hair, an insect-headed worker/wife straining against the rigid confines of her intelligence and experience.
All she knew was that her husband was hurting inside, which was most certainly true; and that she was afraid for him, which he had no doubt was true as well.
He counted the beats until she started again. He was correct within a fraction of a second.
“I’m worried about Harry,” she said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“He won’t tell me what’s the matter, of course—he’s a very private person—but, well, you saw him today.”
“Yes.” Acutely sympathetic. “I did.”
“He looks terrible.” She paused for dramatic effect. He could picture every troubled shake of her head. “It scares me. You know how he is, with his heart condition and all.”
In the invisible privacy of his home, he could smile without fear. “No,” he said. “I didn’t know about that.”
“Oh, yes. He nearly had a stroke last March, and his doctor told him that…” she began. At that point, it was safe to let her voice phase out for the duration of the litany, throw in mm-hmms at the appropriate junctures.
He needed time to think.
The thing could go a couple of ways, he knew: one bad, the other worse, but you played the hand life dealt you. It was just a matter of where the damage stopped: with Leonard, or all the way at the top. Either way, Leonard was screwed, so humanitarian concerns weren’t even part of the discussion.
But it was thoughtful of him to provide the heart condition, Blake mused. Either way, that could come in handy.
The fascinating story of Dr. Deitrich’s healthful hints was wrapping up. Time to tune back in.
“…never listens,” she continued. “That’s why, when he took you aside in church…”
“I’m sorry,” he interrupted. “But that’s pretty much why I called.”
“Oh?” It was her turn to listen, and God was she grateful. Tell me something, she silently pleaded. Tell me what I want to hear.
He hated to disappoint her. But not very much. “I don’t know,” he said. “He was obviously upset, and it seemed that he wanted to tell me something important. But then he just stopped; and, frankly, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since.”
“Oh, dear.” Her tone epitomized distress. If it turned out that he never came home again, she would be able to tell her friends that she’d known it was happening. She’d just felt it. You know?
Another Mystery of the Unknown revealed. And thank you, Time-Life Books.
“Well, I’ll just give a call down there,” he said. “See if we can’t straighten this out.”
“Oh, thank you.” She meant it with all her heart.
“And in the meantime,” he suggested, “take care of yourself and the little ones, will you?”
Blake rang off a moment later, leaned back in his chair, and let his thoughts run free. The pop and fizzle of expensive hardwoods going up in smoke was meditative, much-needed tonic to his nerves.
So much to do, he thought. So little time.
And miles to go before I sleep.…
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Harold Leonard was about to awaken.
He paced the length of his clogged offices: a Skinner-box rat, up to his neck in rifled files and rationalizations. He was weighing the terrors of turning state’s evidence against the sheer fathomless depth of the shit he was in.
Outside lay the crumbling chemical domain that was Leonard’s legacy. Shoehorned into a seven-acre facility on the outskirts of town, Paradise Waste Disposal was originally touted as a kind of franchise, one-stop shopping for the growing waste industry. Garbage had long since passed wheat or oil or steel as the nation’s perennial bumper crop, and Paradise Waste was built to take big bites of the toxic pie. Solid into the ground, liquid into the river, medical into the incinerator and up into the sky. Even radioactive, once the permits went through.
Paradise Waste Disposal was nothing if not ambitious.
Between Blake’s EPA connections and his…other connections—shadowy suits with Jersey plates—Leonard’s little plant had mushroomed into a modern success story, the proverbial right way that Blake and the industrial community had used to beat the NIMBY-ridden local troublemakers into complacency. Not In My Back Yard was old thinking, a luxury no longer affordable; Paradise Waste Disposal was the future.
It was a raging success.
Too successful, in fact. Paradise Waste had blossomed, then burgeoned, then bloated to bursting on its own success. It had become a hodgepodge of pits, ponds, landfills, and storage tanks, all filled to capacity and beyond. Forty thousand drums stood—stacked and staggered, palleted and piled—in rows as long as city blocks. A rainbow smorgasbord of pestilence intermingled on the site: dioxins, PCBs, amine leachates, heavy metals, mercury, and benzene. Just last week, Harold had gotten a shipment of a thousand drums of tetraethyl leads so unstable that they spontaneously combusted on contact with air.
Business was booming, all right. The incinerators burned night and day.
It still wasn’t enough.
Harold opened his file of “special” invoices, hands trembling. There was no denying it. Conville Chain, Penn/Dover Laboratories, General Unidyne, MegaTech Industries, Paradise Caterpillar, Paradise Air Conditioners, on down to Paradise Paper Products…He had accepted “overstock” from all of them, and on a frighteningly regular basis. Plus the midnight runs from Blake’s business associates in Philly and Jersey.
Once delivered, they washed their hands of it.
After that, it was his problem.
By his own crude reckoning, almost six thousand drums had been farmed out to the Pussers over the current fiscal year. God only knew where the next disaster would spring up, grinning like a skull-faced warning label: in a borehole, under an elementary school; right in the goddamned reservoir. His entire operation thrived in a vacuum of neglect, courting scandal like a bent-over congressional page.
A scandal would lead to an investigation.
An investigation would lead to an indictment.
An indictment to a trial.
And the trial-bone’s connected to the…JAIL-bone…
“Shut up!” Leonard pounded the singsong nattering in his skull, already feeling the rope tighten around his neck. When he closed his eyes, he saw himself: crying out to his accusers in the courtroom of his mind, waving handfuls of crumpled invoices at the featureless shadow-faces. Protesting the inevitability of his guilt.
To no avail.
“Oh, God,” he croaked in desperate, spontaneous prayer. “Oh, God, please…” Everything he’d built was coming down around his ears, collapsing into rubble and ruin
. Paradise Waste Disposal was a rock tied around his neck and hurled into the abyss, and Leonard was just standing on the edge, watching the line play out.
“Oh, God,” he reiterated, dry-heaving tears, “please…”
And suddenly a fist closed around Harold’s cholesterolclotted heart, sending lightning stabs of pain slicing through his chest. He broke out in an instantaneous, copious sweat and dropped the sheaf of papers scattering to the floor.
“No,” he whinnied, stripped of air and power. “Not like this…”
Pain jetted through his left arm, exploding in fire buds that blossomed in his brain. Somehow he found a chair, stumbled into it, and held on tight: blood pressure thudding in his temples, roaring like a runaway fire hose through his skull. His heart body-slammed him again, rocking him back. His eyes rolled heavenward.
And his prayers were answered.
Sudden sense of dislocation, cut loose from the fragile mooring of flesh. Sent rocketing up and out of body, through the ceiling, and soaring high above the glistening dump below, the pools like distant, tiny baubles.
Seeing, then, the culture to which he was slave: the greedy, insatiable eating machine. Shoveling resources in the one end, shitting poison out the other. A fat, blind, dying carcass, smothering all as it wallowed in its own excrement.
Seeing Exxon and Bechtel, McDonald’s and Dow, General Motors and General Foods and a host of others, a parade of myopic corporate criminals that burrowed and bored through civilization like flies in offal. Raping their heritage. Devouring their young. Breeding swarms of dull-eyed mall-dwellers who were utterly convinced that happiness was not possible without one more disposable cigarette lighter, one more combustion engine, one more burger in a polystyrene box.
Seeing waves of humanity, lemming-racing face-first into the future, throwing their garbage over their shoulders and never once pausing to wonder where it went, or what it did when it got there.
And, finally, seeing himself: part puppet, part pawn, part piggy on a conveyor belt, squealing as he rolled toward his date with the knife.
He saw it all, in a single moment of absolute clarity.
Then the telephone rang.
“YAHHH!” he cried, nearly jumping out of his skin. The hallucination evaporated, leaving the reality right where he’d left it: heart in a vise grip, ass in a sling, evidence scattered all over the floor.
The phone rang again.
It’s Blake, he knew. Oh, Jesus. His fear was a fact that surprised him; until this moment, he hadn’t realized how frightened of Blake he actually was.
And that in itself was a revelation, clicking into place with the rest of the vision. He realized, as the phone rang again, that something fundamental felt changed inside him. Different. Stronger, perhaps.
He looked at the papers strewn about at his feet, saw all those names and numbers listed; and in that moment—in a second wave of illumination—understood precisely what the difference was.
He no longer felt alone.
“Hello,” he said, picking up on the fourth ring.
“Hi, Harry,” Blake said. “Just checking in.”
“Good,” Leonard said, feeling the strength of his convictions. “ ‘Cause there were a few things I wanted to ask you, too.”
Beat. “Shoot.”
“Well, for example, I need to know what you plan to do about the kid who got hurt.”
“Actually, I was hoping you might have a suggestion.”
“Me?” Leonard laughed. The pain was still bad—a fireball in his chest, radiating outward to his extremities—but at least it was stable. It was easy to believe, in that moment, that the worst was actually over. “I thought you were taking care of this.”
Barely missing a beat. “We’re working on it.”
“Well, good, because I talked to Pusser a while ago, and he was threatening to talk to the cops if something didn’t happen fast.”
“Oh…?”
“ ‘Oh’ is right.” He was on a roll now, and the taint of sarcasm in his voice exhilarated him. “And that could be a problem. Because if they go to prison, they’ll take me with them.”
“Not necessarily—”
“And if I go down,” he cut in, “I’ll have no choice but to drag everyone else down, too.”
Long beat of silence.
“Harry, don’t you think you’re overreacting?”
“Am I?”
“Yes, I think you are.”
“Well, then, straighten me out, Werner. Calm me down.”
“What do you need to know?”
“How you plan to keep me out of jail.”
Not a dropped beat this time. Straight into the pitch. Leonard had to admire how quick Blake was, when the chips were down.
“The first and most important job is containment. So far, we’ve been lucky. Nobody knows anything…”
“Ah.” Using Blake’s smug little throat noise against him. “But don’t you think they should?”
“What?” Incredulous now. It made Leonard smile to get a rise out of him like that. Amazingly, the pain in his chest had dwindled to little more than an afterthought.
“Don’t you think people deserve to know that there’s poison in the Codorus? I mean, when you talk about containment, does that mean you intend to hush the whole thing up? Or just the part that might point back at you?”
“Harry…”
“When is someone gonna take some responsibility for this? I mean, Christ! It’s not worth the money anymore, Werner! This whole thing is just out of control! Doesn’t it scare you to think of what might be out there? In your water? In your food? In your air?”
Nothing from Blake. Leonard continued, feeling his whole life solidify, come together beneath him in this moment of truth.
“Well, it scares me half to death, and I’ll tell you what else. I feel guilty as hell, and I don’t know what to do about it. I mean, in some ways, we probably should go to jail…”
“Harry,” Blake interrupted, and this time he would not be forestalled. “I hear what you’re saying, but I’ve got to ask: do you really think that, by going to jail, you’d be helping make the world a better place for anybody?”
Leonard started to reply, but it was Blake’s turn to override.
“Seriously, just stop and think for a minute. I mean, I certainly understand how you feel. Sometimes I lay awake nights, thinking about all the terrible things we’ve done to this poor world of ours, and wondering if it isn’t already too late.”
Leonard’s mouth opened, and nothing came out.
“But then I think about our work—about all the jobs that we create, the meaningful and necessary employment we generate, the goods and services that we provide—and I think, the world needs guys like us, Harry!”
Leonard felt his spirit deflate and his fight diminish, as Blake turned Harold’s own rationalizations on him like a pack of hounds. For a moment there, everything had seemed so clear…
“You know what would happen if there were no Paradise Waste Disposal?” Blake asked, and answered. “Local industry would either be forced to spend more money shipping their waste out of town, which they would not like to do: or we’d go back to the bad old days, when waste treatment was unheard-of and it ALL went into the creek! Does that make any kind of sense to you?”
“Well, no, but—”
“But, nothing, Harry! You know I’m right on this one.”
“But I—”
“Harry,” Blake said, crushing the last of Leonard’s fight like a spent cigarette butt. “Don’t go soft on me now, buddy. You’re right: we’ve been playing this way too fast and loose, and it’s high time we cleaned up our act.”
“That’s what I—”
“I’ll tell you what,” Blake continued, a velvet steamroller squashing all debate. “We pull together on this one until we’re out of the woods. And if you still want out, well, we’ll buy you out. You walk away: free and clear, new lease on life.”
This time, the silence was
entirely Leonard’s call.
“C’mon, Harry. Whaddaya say?”
“What do you want me to do?” Leonard said at last.
On the other end, Blake sighed with enormous relief; and Leonard, perversely, echoed the sound, if not the sentiment.
“You’re a stand-up guy, Harry. I mean that,” Blake said, and he sounded utterly genuine, like a real friend. It was the first time Werner had ever spoken that way to him. Like he was one of the gang.
“Okay!” Blake said. “First off, I want you to relax, and trust me, for God’s sake! I won’t let you go down the tubes. The DER can find hazardous chemicals in the river without knowing where they came from, right? It’s not like they have your fingerprints on ‘em, right?”
And Leonard was forced to agree.
“As for the Pusser boy, I’ll arrange for someone to take care of him.”
“What about the truck?” His voice, to his own ears, sounded panicky and stupid: the same old Harold Leonard.
“Once again,” Blake said, “just trust me, alright?”
And right then something went ping in Harold Leonard’s head. Maybe it was the way Blake leaned on the T-word till it squealed. Maybe it was the whiff of reptile-smile on the other end of the line.
Either way, something clicked: and Harold Leonard realized that Blake was playing him like a fiddle, stroking his every insecurity even as he force-fed him his own rationalizations. And Harold knew then that he was not a part of Werner’s gang, and never ever would be.
It was a fact that made him proud.
Harold sat up a little more erect, as if he’d just grown in stature. He reflected the smile back through the miles of fiberoptic cable, and was glad he did.
“Sure will, Werner,” he promised.
“And thanks for setting me straight.”
Blake took another three minutes, give or take a second, to stroke Leonard utterly into submission. Then the two men hung up, each certain in his own mind of what had to be done.
Blake leaned back in his chair, thought about the conversation past. How easy it was to bamboozle the little shit. And paradoxically, how close they had come to actual honest confrontation. How welcome, in so many respects, that confrontation would have actually been.
The Bridge Page 15
